My dog has become a vicious killer of opossums.

Ivy: Vicious Killer of Opossums

Napa: Enthusiastic Sidekick

I bear no great love for opossums. In fact, they are one of my least favorite animals. If you were to ask me, "Hey, Shasta, would you rather be locked up in a room with an opossum or with a dozen cockroaches?" I might have to go with the roaches. And I hate roaches. This hatred originated in Texas, where I lived for a time in an apartment building that was quite infested with these miracles of evolution. When your apartment building is infested with roaches, there is very little you can do in your individual apartment to keep them out of your personal space. Roaches, as you might know, have developed the ability to survive on lint. More recently, I have heard that some roaches have even started to burrow inside televisions and other appliances, where they live off electricity. This is fantastic if you are in a cyberpunk novel, but incomprehensibly creepy if you are not.

You think roaches can't teleport? Think again. Those bastards can just beam themselves into your cabinets if they put their diabolical little bug minds to it. Now, while it is something of a myth that everything in Texas is big, Texan roaches are indeed enormous. If you are a little girl who just wants to get a bowl so you can sit around in your Wonder Woman Underoos while eating Cap'n Crunch, the cockroach that ambushes you as you reach for the aforementioned bowl will seem approximately the size of a guinea pig. A guinea pig with a hard shell. And while you might think that Wonder Woman should just be able to get into her invisible jet and fly away from the vermin, I've got to tell you that escape isn't always possible.

Hopefully, this provides you with some scale--a measuring stick by which to understand the degree to which opossums freak me out on an intensely visceral level. They seem fundamentally, cosmically wrong, with their beady little eyes and their pointy little teeth and their naked rat tails. Have you ever had an opossum hiss at you? My god, it's terrifying. I can watch half a dozen zombie movies in a row with very little change in my blood pressure, but I think I would be totally incapable of watching a horror movie in which ill-fated protagonists battle troops of embittered opossums. That would be worth at least two thousand therapy points.

My dog Ivy doesn't like opossums, either. However, while my preferred approach would be to pretend that opossums don't exist, and to wipe all traces of encounters with opossums from my mind--surgically, if necessary--Ivy is a little more direct. She sees an opossum running across the top of our fence, she runs and jumps, and she does her best to make sure that the opossum will never again run across the top of a fence. Napa, who doesn't have the prey instinct that Ivy has but is nonetheless descended from bird dogs, does what she can to help out her packmate. I've tallied their kill count at four now, and who knows how many more they have injured?

Neither dog understands why Jeff and I aren't more supportive of their efforts to decimate the opossum population of North Orange County. I imagine they feel like the kid whose parents never showed up for her soccer games, because Daddy was too busy with his PBR and NASCAR on Saturdays, and Mommy was last seen at a truck stop in Tehachapi. Still, this communication barrier is not what's foremost in my mind when I have settled down for the evening with Jeff to watch a movie, and perhaps we've had some wine, and we're feeling quite relaxed--until we let our dogs out before we all head to bed, not realizing that Ivy is about to sprint after one of the grey, furry creatures she hates so much. When that happens, I am left to call the dogs in and peer out into the yard, where I can tell an opossum still lies--its status as a living being questionable--and wonder what to do. Is the creature suffering? I wonder, mulling over my responsibilities as a compassionate human being. Should I go out there?

Then, I experience what in addiction parlance is referred to as a "moment of clarity." I am seriously considering venturing into the darkest corner of my back yard while half-crocked, armed with nothing but hope and a bottle of Bactine, to mend the wounds of an animal that will probably spring at my throat like that killer bunny from Monty Python. At the very least, it will get me signed up for an endless series of rabies shots. Did I learn nothing from Jeepers Creepers? When somebody says, "I really think we should go back and check on those people who were wrapped up in a bag and dumped in a hole," what you say is "no." If that same somebody then asks you how you would feel if you were one of the people who had been wrapped in a bag and dumped into a hole, the appropriate response is, "Dead. I'd feel dead."